Theatre in Review: Honey Brown Eyes (Working Theatre/Theatre Row) Following the murders in Arizona last week, there's been so much talk about the breakdown of civility in America that it's easy to forget how good we have it. Consider Honey Brown Eyes, in which the playwright Stefanie Zadravec takes on one of the most modern -- and most vexing -- of challenges, depicting a society marked by a total breakdown of the civil order. Her subject is Bosnia in the early '90s, when the former Yugoslavia broke up into its ethnic building blocks, and everyone used their nationality or religion as a license to kill. In trying to portray this kind of social chaos, Zadravec employs a narrative strategy that, on the face of it, seems rather ingenious. Honey Brown Eyes is structured as a diptych of interrelated plays about lives spent in hiding from viral outbreaks of mass murder. It's also a tale of two cities, or, if you will, two kitchens. The first is set in Visegard, where, in the summer of 1992, Bosnian Serbs murdered hundreds of people, most of them Muslims. Alma, a young Muslim woman, finds herself at the point of a gun held by Dragan, a paramilitary looking for Muslim women to haul away. Complicating the situation is the fact that Zlata, Alma's daughter, is hiding in the ceiling. At the same time, in Sarajevo, Denis, a young Muslim man fleeing a neighborhood death squad, forces his way into the apartment belonging to Jovanka, an older woman living alone. (Jovanka's family has made a run for it, desperately trying to escape to Italy.) As it happens, these are not entirely random events. Dragan and Denis were once part of a rock band, which fell apart when the drummer died of heroin addiction and the others couldn't agree on a way forward. Alma is Denis' sister, and Dragan was once infatuated with her. If you think these connections will help anyone survive one minute longer, you have no idea of what happens when the law vanishes and the killings start. It's an interesting approach to a difficult subject, building situations that are, in some ways, mirror images of each other -- and yet are very different. Dragan's cat-and-mouse games with his hostages make a strong contrast with the growing relationship between Denis and Jovanka, each of whom is desperate in his or her own way. In such a situation, everyday morality is less than useless; as Jovanka points out, the only duty is to stay alive. One can ask why another day. Despite the playwright's imagination and seriousness of purpose, however, Honey Brown Eyes never fully persuades. It's nearly impossible, I think, for an American audience to really grasp the full horror of life in a failed state; in recent years, the only plays that have gotten near it have been Ruined and parts of The Great Game: Afghanistan. In contrast, Honey Brown Eyes suffers from a certain artificiality that proves distracting. Zadravec's decision to have the characters speak in a contemporary American idiom doesn't prove helpful, but each part of the play has weaknesses of its own. The action is so fast and violent in the Visegrad scenes that we never get much of a chance to know the characters; in the Sarajevo scenes, they nearly talk your ear off bemoaning their fates, and there's too many cute-old-lady character bits involving Jovanka, a real wisecracker if ever there was one. ("I have eyes in the back of my hairdo," she explains to Denis. Later, when he refuses a cigarette, she mutters, "Who quits smoking in a war?") Oddly, Zadravec demonstrates no interest in the tangle of tribal hatreds and historical atrocities that led this part of the world to ignite. It's possible that another director might establish a more plausible atmosphere, but, in this case, Erica Schmidt's overwrought staging results in a series of performances that never seem like anything more than performances. (One exception is 11-year-old Beatrice Miller, who fully conveys the second-by-second terror of Zlata's existence.) For most of its running time -- especially when the action of the two narratives converge -- Honey Brown Eyes comes off as alternately melodramatic and heavily sentimental. Laura Jellink's unusual setting features a wide and extremely shallow apartment setting for the Visegrad scenes; the actors have barely 6' of stage depth in some sequences. This adapts rather neatly into Jovanka's apartment in Sarajevo, with one big exception -- there's an upstage cooking alcove into which the actors sometimes disappear altogether. This is another set with an elaborate ceiling, and Jeff Croiter, the lighting designer, has taken advantage of side angles to create two very different and meticulously detailed looks. Emily Rebholz's costumes are appropriately distressed and feel accurate for the time and place. Bart Fasbender's many sound effects include classical, rock, and hip-hop selections, along with the inevitable guns and bombs. One has to appreciate Zadravec's effort even if it doesn't come to life. Honey Brown Eyes is pretty good at showing the violence it so abhors, but it never helps us to see why it is happening in the first place.--David Barbour 
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